This Needs to Be Said

[KaivaC]

I agree with everything you said.
However, regarding this last point, the Japanese playerbase was not at all positive about Anemos, judging from some of the translated forum posts.
I wonder how they are reacting to Pagos. Does anyone know?

The little bit I've been able to piece together between the JP side of the OF and reddit comments, the general response was that they were neutral about it when it first came out, though slightly skewed towards negative. I'm not sure how it is now - I do know there's a couple of threads about it on the OF too. You'd have to look under Game Systems > dungeon to track what they are saying here on the forums, though.

[Kazrah]

After doing enough of Eureka to know how horrible it is, I actually want Diadem back. It gave gatherers something to do, it had hardline goals with a smaller timer so you weren't sitting on your thumbs for hours at a time, it was something that I feel best catered to smaller casual FCs, and there wasn't anything like a relic that implied that you had to run it.

Yes, Diadem had massive flaws, but I'd still take it over Eureka any day.

[KaivaC]

After doing enough of Eureka to know how horrible it is, I actually want Diadem back. It gave gatherers something to do, it had hardline goals with a smaller timer so you weren't sitting on your thumbs for hours at a time, it was something that I feel best catered to smaller casual FCs, and there wasn't anything like a relic that implied that you had to run it.

Yes, Diadem had massive flaws, but I'd still take it over Eureka any day.

I will admit one thing - Eureka would've been an amazingly great piece of content. You have a storyline behind it that ties all the way back to ARR, you have an absolutely massive zone, you have so much space to put in things like beast tribe-like quests, gathering points, sightseeing logs for those interested...something that could actually be worthwhile to visit and actually create an open world environment that actually has a lot of potential. Could've revived Hamlet defense, could've allowed the magia board to help us improve our relic armor and weapon through activities inside of Eureka...

...Instead, we have FATE grinds. And that's it. So much potential being wasted on a lazy mechanic that players were already sick of. I would not be surprised if Absolute Virtue shows up as a super FATE boss in Eureka down the line. Yes, even I, who did not play MMOs at the time, heard of the madness that was Absolute Virtue, complete with the 2 hour despawn timer.

There's so much room to do more than just...spawn NMs and kill dragons for hours on end (and before it gets said again, yes, I did get very familiar with Pagos before the maintenance because my next relic step is locked behind it).